ShoCard Digital Identity and Authentication Platform

ShoCard - Identity for a Mobile World. Secure, Consumer-Friendly Identity Verification

Identity Management (IM) of the future will make sharing and authenticating an identity more efficient, private, and secure and will free us from the burden of maintaining separate user IDs for each service we use. It eliminates the middleman and wait lines for authentication, authorization, and attestation. Each identity will belong to a single person and no other, eternally linking our digital identity to our inherent physical existence. It will allow us to decide what parts of our identity we want to share and with whom we want to share it. It leads us into a world with far less centralized databases full of private identity information that can be hacked and used against us.

The solution for IM lives in the promise of the immutable blockchain—a true peer-to-peer public platform that bypasses arbiters and intermediaries and allows peers to establish trust and verify identity that is cryptographically secure. The emerging blockchain-enabled IM paradigm will profoundly change the way we interact and trade with one another and is guaranteed to fundamentally transform industries—starting with the financial and travel industries and enterprise identity.

ShoCard IM Platform

ShoCard is a blockchain-based IM ecosystem where people can own and protect their digital identity. They decide with whom and when to share their personal data. Third parties are able to validate the authenticity of that data using the blockchain without the need to trust other centralized third-parties to vouch for it. ShoCard is not an idea; it’s not a prototype; it’s a product in production.

The ShoCard Identity Management (IM) Platform provides the ability for organizations and individuals to:

• Authenticate an individual or an entity
• Exchange auditable authorization
• Exchange attestation of an individual’s credentials

The platform is designed to be integrated into mobile Apps and servers via its Software Development Kits (SDKs), supporting both iOS and Android. The ShoCard architecture has been designed to provide high throughput transactions that are not bogged down with the performance of public blockchains. It’s able to create and certify over 5 million new users with proof of work in less than 30 minutes.

Furthermore, it is blockchain agnostic, so it can use multiple blockchains at the same time and adopt new ones in the future, including private ones. To avoid hacks of personal identifiable information, the ShoCard system uses the blockchain only to verify data, not to store it.

The company currently provides two products. The first is an embedded model of Software as a Service (SaaS), and the second is a complete Identity Provider (IdP) solution based on SAML and OpenID Connect for the enterprise.    

The following are some of the use cases deployed with current clients:

• Enterprise Access: Device-Independent Username-less and Password-less Login

• Onboarding and Know Your Customer (KYC) Leveraging 

• Credit Card Transaction Authorization • Call Center Authentication 

• Remote Biometric Authentication

• Credit Report Sharing • Walking-Speed Biometric Authentication for Travel

But this is just the beginning. Mobile identity verified by the blockchain can be applied to numerous other verticals as well.

The uniqueness of the ShoCard patented ecosystem is the fundamental shift to individual ownership of their identity, where people share only what they choose and with whom they choose. Furthermore, this ecosystem allows receiving parties to authenticate identity-attached data independently using the blockchain and without having to trust any central database. The individual’s data is never stored in any central database in order to provide the identity management services, not even on the blockchain. The blockchain only holds verification codes. These patented algorithms ensure that user data is never exposed and hackers can never reverse engineer the data. 

Privacy is the foundation of free societies. IM of the future must restor our privacy. Each identity must belong to a single person and no other, eternally linking our digital identity to our inherent physical existence. It must allow us to decide what parts of our identity we want to share and with whom we want to share it. It must lead us into a world with far less centralized databases full of private identity information that can be hacked and used against us.

The answer lies in the promise of blockchain technology. Built on the infrastructure of the Internet and a sibling to the World Wide Web, the immutable blockchain is an emerging global, distributed ledger of truthful information. It’s public and encrypted. It’s a true peer-to-peer platform that bypasses arbiters and intermediaries and allows peers to establish trust and verify identity that is cryptographically secure.

The emerging blockchain-enabled IM paradigm will profoundly change the way we interact and trade with one another. As citizens come to expect identity ownership and privacy, companies that adopt this new IM paradigm will see a bump in their share prices. Those that don’t will suffer the consequences of lost customers. As such, the blockchain IM ecosystem is guaranteed to fundamentally transform industries. 

ShoCard enables its services through an embedded approach, where services are integrated with clients using mobile and server SDKs or through a full-stack solution and mobile application. ShoCard is considered a thought leader in the space; it has received a patent on these systems and methods, along with three additional patents pending and owns a long list of provisional patents as continuations on the initial one.

Different clients can embed the ShoCard services into their servers or Apps using an open ShoCard SDK. The ShoCard SDKs on mobile devices support both iOS and Android. These SDKs perform all verification checks locally on their own servers or devices as to not trust any other service. They can also independently retrieve blockchain records directly and use them for verification.

https://shocard.com/how-it-works/

The ShoCard architecture has been designed to provide high throughput transactions that are not bogged down with the performance of public blockchains. It’s able to create and certify over 5 million new users with proof of work in less than 30 minutes.

Furthermore, it is blockchain agnostic, so it can use multiple blockchains at the same time and adopt new ones in the future, including private ones.

Process: a first-time user is instructed to download the ShoCard enabled App on their iOS or Android device. The App walks the user through a wizard where her identity information is collected, and initial verification begins. This includes collecting her phone number, email address, and images of her live-face (a selfie), driver license, government ID, passport, etc. if applicable.

In all of these cases, the user simply points and clicks and is not required to type data. ShoCard extracts the data from the picture and populates all field values as name=value pairs. This wizard takes about 30 seconds to complete.

The platform is designed to be integrated into mobile Apps and servers via its Software Development Kits (SDKs), supporting both iOS and Android. 

By creating open standards, the ShoCard solution can be implemented by others as well as ShoCard, furthering the propagation of the solution and its adoption. Allowing other providers to offer a similar service only serves to expedite the adoption of the ShoCard IM Platform. 

All mobile applications will utilize mobile phone communication technologies such as cellular data exchange, and Wi-Fi when available to communicate with the core services of the system.

The system can connect through non cellular and Wi-Fi means. For example, two devices may identify each other via blue-tooth and/or a QR code. 

An example of this is when a police officer requires to see the identity of a user, but the User claims to not have connectivity. The entirety of the data, including biometrics and facial images, can still be transferred securely. 

The ShoCard platform is not an idea, but an actual system that has already been built with paying clients who are using it today. However, extending the platform in a couple of ways will help to drive adoption and propagate ShoCard’s blockchain-enabled IM ecosystem: creating open standards, and more importantly, expediting market development. 

The success of a platform is best shown through market adoption. While the technology described is implemented and will inevitably continue to be improved, ShoCard management will give a greater priority to Go To Market (GTM) strategies that allows market adoption and scale.

ShoCard has a partnership with one of the largest credit-card networks in the world as well as other major financial institutions including:

• Creditinfo Group: to allow consumers to share their credit reports with banks

• Bank Aljazira: to protect clients’ information and avoid fraud, username and password-less login, transaction authorization as well as onboarding and facilitation of a KYC solution

• A US-based large bank (name-withheld). Usage is to allow login on any device without usernames and passwords; perform KYC and document-loading as well as transaction authorization.

• Largest mobile operator in Germany

Top-Notch Technical Staff

ShoCard’s technical staff has top-notch experience with high volume, high scale solutions. Gaurav Khot, as Chief Architect, along with Armin Ebrahimi, CEO, built one of the largest networks at Yahoo! where by 2004, it served over 20 billion transactions per day. During his tenure at Yahoo! from 2004 to 2008, Armin was the SVP of Platform engineering, responsible for among other things, Identity and fraud with over 500 million registered users.

The team has extensive experience in technology at some of the most premier companies in Silicon Valley. 

We have both non-recurring engineering revenue (NRE) as well as annually recurring revenue (ARR).

ShoCard primarily has a subscription pricing model and we charge $1-$2 per user per year for consumer based business (Business to Business to Consumer). Depending on the installation, there may be a onetime license fee for setup.

ShoCard Enterprise solution that utilizes SAML and OpenID Connect and provides authentication services for Single Sign On. Pricing for enterprise, ranges between $1 to $3 per user per month depending on the services they require (e.g., facial recognition and geo-targeting). 

We feel this is an excellent opportunity to demonstrate the potential of ShoCard's technology to serve underbanked people who historically have not had access to traditional banking services (e.g., checking, credit cards, loans, etc.) and may live in remote non-urban locations. Providing these services to the underbanked offers financial institutions a unique opportunity for growth in many nations. While this group lacks access to traditional banking branches, they do have access to mobile phones which provide new means of engaging them in the financial world. 

ShoCard and its premier blockchain-based IM ecosystem are positioned to lead us there.

Key barriers include:

• Market’s understanding how blockchains work
• The immediacy of pain as a forcing function to adopt a new tech
• Not wanting to be the first to try something so new
• The overwhelming and existing penetration of usernames and passwords everywhere
• End user-training and adoption

The emerging blockchain-enabled IM paradigm will profoundly change the way we interact and trade with one another and is guaranteed to fundamentally transform industries for the better. With its scalable architecture, open portfolio of patented algorithms and methods, open standards, and strong leadership, ShoCard’s premier blockchain-based IM ecosystem are positioned to lead us there.